On 2/3/2011 8:58 AM, David Green wrote:
> SA wrote:
>
> I don't really understand what you're asking. I didn't read the Gordon paper,
> but in the long run productivity growth requires the growth of skills. Most
> people are benefiting less than fully from productivity growth, productivity
> growth does depend in part on their skills.
>
>
>
> SA, do you think that there has not been growth of skills and productivity
> growth in this country? Do you think that the educational system could have
> performed better, and thus produced more skilled and more productive workers? Do
> you think that there are jobs going unfilled for the lack of skilled and
> productive workers? Do you think that our educational system explains the
> differences between the U.S. and other countries who have more productive
> workers and higher incomes?
Abstracting from the US case, there's a large empirical "growth accounting" literature that looks at the contribution of skills and education to long-run productivity growth. I can't claim to know all the ins and outs of this literature, but honest and meticulous economists like Zvi Griliches have agreed with the standard conclusion that skills account for a significant share of variation in growth rates - e.g., 1/3. You can see this piece by Griliches which reviews the last 50 years of work on the topic: http://www.jstor.org.proxy.library.cornell.edu/stable/2535410 .
In the US case, today's unemployment has nothing to do with skills. The explicand we're talking about is the long-run growth of labor productivity, not the unemployment rate. This is the key point, in my view: skills can't have much to do with America's current economic problems because its current economic problems (going back at least 15 years) don't have anything to do with productivity. They have to do with unemployment and inequality. But yes, in principle, based on the general principle above, you should expect that productivity growth would have been higher with greater skills in the past, and will be limited in the future to the extent that skills don't increase as fast as they used to.
That said, I'm certainly open to any good, well-grounded critiques of the human capital perspective. By well-grounded, I mean one that knows the existing literature and offers a solid theoretical and empirical challenge to it.
SA